Farewell swansong...

Madadayo (まあだだよ Not Yet, Japanese; 1993)
Director: Akira Kurosawa

This sombre offering is Kurosawa's swan song. Ironically, it is a comedy but the subject deals something as depressing as life after retirement, war and essentially waiting for death! If fact, the title of film is a joke often told the main character referring to his life whose time (end of it) has reached yet - not yet!

Professor Uchida (whom his students address fondly as Sinsei) is a lovable German language professor in Japan who is at the tail end of his teaching career. It is set at a time just before the second World War. After his retirement, he continues entertaining his students at his humble home sharing his own trademark jokes. The students, even after growing old continue his acquaintance. Periodically, he gather for his birthday. They even help him out when his home is raged by shell after the war.

The movie shows the cordial respect between teacher and student. Just when the student think their teacher would kick the bucket, the elder would jocularly reply, "Madayo!" - not yet.

This Kurosawa offering may not be in the same league as many of his doyens, nevertheless, it showcases the class act of a master director who could send the subtle message that all is not lost when you are old and less productive. Life is not over till it is over and life is meant to savoured, every drop of it.

The million dollar question is what is enjoying life? Is it meant to be a time to party like there is no tomorrow as they say you only live once (YOLO)? Or is it is an opportune time to immerse oneself in prayers and charity work to wash the sins of your current or previous lives so as to cajole the forces of Universe to springboard your soul up the ladder of karma or assure a 'free pass' past the purgatory?

Seize the day, Carpe diem!

You think you have got it made. You think you are perfect. That is what everyone aims for. And we all yearn to be THE one. Many want to leave their legacy behind, something for their descendants to feel proud of. Mythology repeatedly told over time from ear to ear over the years, got spiced up and snowballed to portray infallible characters, invincible, just, powerful and elevated to demi-God and God statuses.

As usual, my mind got thinking...
That could explain the many 'great' men (mahaans) and avatars of God who had graced and walked the land we stand on. Not to belittle the great deeds that they had done, there must be blemishes in their otherwise pristine time on Earth.

When Robin William passed on recently, the internet and social media were fluff with a flurry of messages praising him to high heaven. Many thanked him for the comedy and making the world a happier place. One even praised him in his role as a motivating teacher in 'Dead Poets Society'. If not for that film, he would not enjoy literature that much and pursued that line of career. Some highlighted the pathetic and helpless situation of being trapped in the world of the black dog. Despite duelling with manic depressive illness for a good part of his adult life, he still managed to live a full life.

The passing of an individual is always remembered by the good deeds done by them. The public generally likes to put a lid on their shortcomings, thankfully so. Maybe not for all- Hitler, Stalin, Atilla the Hun etcetera.

Wikipedia checkup did show a few unsavoury conducts by the actor exhibited. Besides his substance addiction which could be attributed to his illness, he had been the cause of his own marital disharmony. Imagine, how a pregnant wife would feel when your husband is sued by his extramarital tryst sues him for infecting her with herpes!

Despite all his shortcomings, he must have been good in other ways. He still has a cordial relationship with his daughter and a string of grieving fans. Rest in peace.
Life is a symphony with crescendos and fortissimos. The joy of music that emanates is precisely from these troughs and ploughs of notes.

AK-47 designer Kalashnikov wrote penitent letter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ak-47-designer-kalashnikov-wrote-penitent-letter/2014/01/13/5f8463b2-7c72-11e3-97d3-b9925ce2c57b_story.html

Vladimir Vyatkin, File/Associated Press - FILE - In this Wednesday, Oct. 29, 1997 file photo Mikhail Kalashnikov shows a model of his world-famous AK-47 assault rifle at home in the Ural Mountain city of Izhevsk, 1000 km (625 miles) east of Moscow. The designer of the world’s most prolific firearm, the AK-47 assault rifle, has written a sorrowful letter to the Russian Orthodox Church’s head, asking if he’s to blame for the deaths of those killed by his creation. According to a Monday, Jan. 13, 2014 report in the daily Izvestia, several months before his death last month at age 94, Kalashnikov wrote to Patriarch Kirill that he keeps asking himself if he’s responsible for those deaths.

By Associated Press, Updated: Tuesday, January 14, 3:42 AM

MOSCOW — In a regretful letter penned a few months before his death, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle, asked the head of the Russian Orthodox Church if he was to blame for the deaths of those killed by his weapon.

The Russian daily Izvestia on Monday published the letter, in which Kalashnikov, who died last month at 94, told Patriarch Kirill that he kept asking himself if he was responsible. The AK-47 is the world’s most popular firearm, with an estimated 100 million spread around the world.

“The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people’s deaths,” he said in the letter.

Kalashnikov also shared his bitter thoughts about humankind.

“The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression,” Kalashnikov continued. “Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he’s just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!”

Kalashnikov’s daughter, Elena, was quoted by Izvestia as saying that a local priest could have helped her father write the two-page letter, which was typed and carried his signature.

The rifle’s simplicity and reliability made it a weapon of choice for the Third World insurgents backed by the Soviet Union. Moscow not only distributed the AK-47 widely but also licensed its production in some 30 other countries. The gun’s cult status among revolutionaries and national-liberation fighters is enshrined on the flag of Mozambique.

The letter, which was sent in April, contrasted sharply with past statements by Kalashnikov, who had repeatedly said in interviews and public speeches that he created the weapon to protect his country and couldn’t be blamed for other people’s action.

“I sleep well. It’s the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence,” the designer told The Associated Press in 2007.

The church sought to comfort him with exactly same argument. Izvestia quoted Kirill’s spokesman Alexander Volkov as saying the Patriarch responded to Kalashnikov and praised him as a true patriot.

“If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it,” the newspaper quoted Volkov as saying.

In 2007, President Vladimir Putin praised Kalashnikov’s weapon as a “symbol of the creative genius of our people.” Putin attended Kalashnikov’s burial at a memorial military cemetery just outside Moscow.

While it’s not especially accurate, Kalashnikov’s rifle can perform in sandy or wet conditions that jam more sophisticated weapons such as the U.S. M-16.

“During the Vietnam war, American soldiers would throw away their M-16s to grab AK-47s and bullets for it from dead Vietnamese soldiers,” Kalashnikov said at a 2007 ceremony marking the rifle’s 60th anniversary.

Kalashnikov, born into a peasant family in Siberia, first showed his designer skills when he invented some modifications for Soviet tanks while serving as a Red Army conscript. He was badly wounded in a 1941 battle with the Nazis and first started designing of a new automatic rifle while he was recovering in the hospital.

Kalashnikov received numerous honors, including the Hero of Socialist Labor and Order of Lenin and Stalin Prize, but never got rich because his invention was never patented.

Kalashnikov continued working into his late 80s as chief designer of the Izmash company that first built the AK-47. He started travelling the world in the waning days of the Soviet Union, serving as a living symbol of Russian prowess in making weapons and helping negotiate new arms deals.

In his letter to the Patriarch, Kalashnikov said that at 91 he began visiting a church in the city of Izhevsk where he worked and died, adding words of praise for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

Everyone enjoys a nice murder!

"Daily Mail" True Crime: Classic, Rare and Unseen(2009)
By Tim Hill

Sometimes, we wonder why is it that, human beings have a fascination towards murder and other heinous crimes. Just have a look at almost all prime time TV shows. They all feature killings and evil as their central pillar. Anyway, with the blurring of what used to be prime time and since now TV is on 24/7 and is cheap and is available all rooms of the house (include the toilet), the concept of prime time where the whole family would sit together after their dinner is not existent.
That propagated mini-series and soap operas that also include the above sins as well as other vices like infidelity, cheating and lying for good measure!

In the old days when one has to wait a full week for his dose of crime, with the advent of cable TV, he is on a perpetual chronic overdose!

In spite of the society's abhorrence to violence, the world we live in, animal or human kingdoms, is full of violence. In the animal kingdom, animals kill for food, mate and dominance. Humans, besides including all of the above, also consists of a group of individual who would do it for the sheer pleasure and hide under the cloak of insanity and mental derangement. Our breaking news on TV and stop press newspaper invariably involve destruction rather than some record-breaking feat. Who says crime does not pay?

Hitchcock and his fixation in bringing
murder to everyone's living room!

The last book that I read recently is a hardcover coffee table type of compilations of stories that appeared on the British 'Daily Mail' daily. (Hardly appetising to digest during a tête-à-tête tea session.)
It covered a lot of murders and crimes involving the myriad of characters spanning all the way from the USA to England (mainly) and an Australian trial of the century case involving Mrs Chamberlain's missing baby allegedly carried away by dingos.
The book comprises newspaper cuttings of cases and analyses the background of the criminal as well as the progression of the situation in court.


The American crimes involve modern day 'Robin Hood' @ Scarface Al Capone, the romanticized Valentine Day Murder, his incarceration for tax evasion and later death by tertiary syphilis; the sad tale of falsely accused of murder of Hollywood's high grossing star of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and his sad end; the trigger happy deadly duo of Bonnie and Clyde; the kidnapping of Charles Lindberg Jr., O. J. Simpson and his hyped trial of his estranged wife; Charles Manson and his cult and killing involving famous stars; the charismatically manipulative Ted Bundy's devious ways as well the flamboyant 'Teflon Don' John Gotti's crimes.

Over the other side of Atlantic, the daily covered extensively crimes like the Great Train Robbery where the loot was magnanimous at that era; Yorkshire Ripper and his 13 victims; the Profumo Affair where a minister had to resign over an affair with a stripper who also dated a Russian official for fear of espionage and leakage of sensitive information; the A6 senseless murder; the Krays twins and organized crimes; Teddington towpath murders of young girls; The West couple and their House of Horror where incestuous crimes, killings and burying of remains remain buried; Dr Harold Shipman- the serial killer doctor who killed 200 over patients; and many more sickening examples.

Our past violent history of killing, conquering and drawing first blood bears testimony to the fact that our civilisation is so entwined with violence and hatred that crime is here to stay for good (sic).

2 ways of dying?

Over the weekend, I met up with a friend who had moved into a spanking new house in the up-market part of town. After the usual cursory formalities and niceties, I had a chat with her father who had been diagnosed to have a serious heart ailment.

YeaH iTs MY liFe..!!!!!!!!! (Bon Jovi)

He is a 77-year-old man who, after the recent passing of his wife of almost 50 years, is living between her three daughters' houses at his own leisure. After striving hard to bring the bacon as a police officer through the hard times of the nation fighting bandits' intelligentsia throughout the country, he is glad that his three children are self-sufficient and independent. He feels that his life and duties on earth are done, and he is living on borrowed time! (Especially after being a chronic smoker of 50 sticks a day for 50 years until one fine day when he developed distaste to cigarettes upon completing pilgrimage to Holy Land). Perhaps, he should have made the trip much earlier in life.
So, when his doctors investigated him for neck pain and found that, through a morbidly terrorising angiogram experience (for him, at least) there were five blocks in his coronary vessels, his decision was pretty easy to make. "No, sire! No intervention for me", he said despite all the well-meaning persuasions from doctors and nurses. "For all you know I may have had these blocks for years before. Thank you very much!"

Well, they are no right or wrong decision in these situations. After all, it is his life. We may have heard of complications during and after surgery.

I was just reading the other day of a doctor who had devised ingenious surgical procedures to treat a particular type of pancreatic cancer which itself had a poor prognosis, by prolonging life by 3 to 5 years, albeit with its poor quality. But sadly when he was afflicted with the very same disease that he had been treating patients for years, what he did was mind boggling to his peers. He called it quits. He closed his practice and decided to spend his remaining days with his family. Sure, he did spend a lot of quality time for the next two years before leaving the company of his family.
That brings us to the two ways of how people deal with sickness - one quietly without pomp and splendour whilst the other in an almost fiesta-like atmosphere. In the former, he would decide to deal with his trying time alone or with immediate family in secrecy. The latter would enjoy the attention, gifts, sympathy and self-pity conveyed by equally extroverted family members and friends from near and far who would have no bearing on the outcome of the disease! The only thing missing would be confetti!

Perpetrators of the latter would vouch that kind support, gentle touch and sympathetic attention goes a long way in the organisation of fibrous tissue and resolution. Call me weird but how is answering the same question on the discovery or detection of the disease, mode of treatment and the constant reminder that everything is going to be okay make you feel rejuvenated, get up, acquire Kryptonic supernatural  powers and run?